Hi All,
My point in mentioning this issue is not to engage in a debate over which
presidential candidate should be elected in the U.S. this
november. However, in searching for some information about the Democratic
convention I noticed a link on the page talking about ADA
Information. That link leads to the address:
http://www.dems2000.com/adainformation.html
The page states in part:
In the pursuit of an all inclusive and accessible convention, the
Democratic National Convention has developed its web site to meet ADA Level
A Conformance
(Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0).
As part of achieving Level A Conformance, for the site, we have added text
equivalents for all non-text content. We have also added ALT tags so as to
enable
speech synthesizer software to read text.
This is all well and good but I find it rather sad then to find links
further down the page which definitely lack alt tags and in one case have
an alt tag that says something different than where the graphical link
leads. Below is the HTML for one section of the page. You'll notice that
the first two links are missing alt text and that the link talking about
coverage graphically mentions day 4 but in text mentions day 1. This
template appears to be used on most pages of the site.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a feedback address to comment on this
situation. If you are going to tell the world you are living up to a
certain standard you should ensure that everything you do meets that standard.
Again this isn't the worst example of web accessibility. Screen readers
display the untagged text something like:
[link] _images081500/gaveltogavel_081700
[link] BehindtheScenes/06_americandialogues
[link] Click here for Day 1 Coverage
***Begin HTML***
<td>
<p align="left"><img
src="_images/col3_heads/headlines_col_hd.gif" width="150" height="15"></p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://np5.netpodium.com/netpodium/dems_wednesday"><img
src="_images081500/gaveltogavel_081700.gif" width="135" height="51"
border="0"></a>
<br>
<br>
<a href="BehindtheScenes/06_americandialogues.html"><img
src="_images081600/american_dialoge.gif" width="135" height="157"
border="0"></a>
</p>
<div align="center"> <a href="day4.html"><img
src="_images/Graphics/day4coverage.gif" width="135" height="51" border="0"
alt="Click here for Day 1 Coverage"></a>
<br>
</div>